Imagination

In Last Man on the Moon, Gene Cernan writes (page 344):

"Sometimes it seems that Apollo came before its time. President Kennedy reached far into the twenty-first century, grabbed a decade of time and slipped it neatly into the 1960s and 1970s ... after Mercury and Gemini, we should have proceeded to build the shuttle, then an orbiting space station, and only then sought the Moon. As it was, we accomplished the impossible, then started over again. It was as if our young nation had chosen never again to cross the Mississippi River after Lewis and Clark ... "

Roger Launius argues that Kennedy made the Moon a priority for purely geo-political and prestige reasons, not out of a personal conviction. According to Gerard DeGroot, Kennedy said to NASA Administrator James Webb:

"I don't really care about the moon. I know it's important; I know there are people who really want to go there, but I just want to beat the Russians."

That may be shocking to some, but more important than Kennedy's political cynicism is the power of imagination to achieve an impossible goal. Not Kennedy's imagination, but the imagination of the American people and the hundreds of thousand of workers, engineers and scientists who made Apollo possible. What did we get out of Apollo? Among many other things, tangible evidence of the power of imagination. As a designer, I can dig that.

Technology, place and community

Andrew Light argues convincingly that the foundation of environmentalism is a primary concern for one’s relationship to one’s fellow humans (“The Moral Journey of Environmentalism: From Wilderness to Place,” in Adaptive Design: Tools for Sustainability, Steven A. Moore, editor). That is, the context for concern for the environment is framed in relationships and human community. In the process, he casts serious doubts on the effectiveness if not validity of the experience of environmentalism as being a quasi-spiritual one, to the point of mocking them. I’ll not take issue with his position on Deep Ecology and its adherents. Of greater interest, particularly in the context of the other readings, is the relationship between environmentalism and community.

(Just using the word environmentalism makes my skin creep if not crawl. Light’s chapter helped me see why: the term marginalizes those with concern for our global health and puts them in the ghetto of reactionary discourse. Thankfully that’s changing, but it has seemed that that label hurt the cause of our common future by objectifying its adherents as extremists. I think I’ll stick to sustainability, as clichéd as that’s becoming).

Now let’s look at GIS (geographic information system; it is to geography and planning as CAD is to architecture), a technology that points to a fundamentally phenomenological understanding of place. The methodology of mapping abstract data in layers (or Themes) onto a digital model of geography has interesting implications. The first is that an abstract tabulation of data can capture the qualities of place. This is not so new: homogeneity or equivalency of space is a Cartesian precept that, as Eliade argued, characterizes the modern world-view as distinct from the tribal or primitive. The difference here is that the sheer quantity of data can produce quite nuanced mappings, as TMY2 data tables or information modeling for land development projects can easily attest. GIS implies that with enough layers, enough data, the unique characteristics of a place will be wholly defined. In that regard, it has the potential for objectifying place as being a thing outside one’s self or world. The notion that a place can be contained within a machine, even virtually, may add to that objectification.

Secondly and more profoundly, the very nature of GIS data, both in its collection and tabulation, implies human use. That is, we collect and organize data according to whether it is useful. One could, I suppose, create a sentimental layer in a GIS model, and as in Light’s village, map locales where marriage proposals have taken place, but that is hardly the common usage. Soil alkalinity, prevailing winds, demographic income levels, automotive traffic—these are the types of data we tend to map. There is therefore an inherent relationship of use in GIS.

Third, GIS allows, even excels, at filtering data. Place is not a singular place; it can be seen as topography, or vegetation, or climate, or fauna, or any of hundreds of data types. In fact, to view all data layers in a GIS model is overwhelming and renders it useless. Its power is in its abstraction (much as architectural drawings).

On these three points — homogenous space, data oriented to human use, and data filtering — GIS or more properly the perspective it implies is an inherently objectifying exercise. But go back to Light’s critique of first and second phase environmentalism. The problem with an individualistic basis for an environmental concern is that while it might appear at first blush to be subjective, that is framing the natural world as the subject of our concern, in an odd way it actually objectifies “nature”, as a personal and exclusive experience.

Because of its emphasis on community — at least potentially — the GIS-view allows for the subjective. We rely on data derived from actual experience (the foundation of phenomenology) in order to construct a graspable model of a geographic region. Furthermore, the GIS-view’s relating geography to human use ties human activity, human experience, human community to “nature”. That is not to say that one cannot use GIS to exploit and damage a geographical region. But by deepening our understanding of the relationship between these layers of data, there is a possibility of seeing our relationship to the physical world not as self and other (objective), but self and larger self (subjective). In practical terms, when we invite “nature” to join our human community, or see humans as part of the “natural” community, we improve the quality of life for systems as a whole, and their human and non-human components.

Space Race 2.0

There's been an increase in the public discussion in the last six months on the establishment of lunar settlements, ever since the 2nd Space Exploration Conference in Houston in December 2006. Gregg Easterbrook wrote an article on NASA's plans for a lunar base for Wired nearly two weeks ago, then was interviewed on NPR, where he repeated some of his assertions and made some new egregious ones. While Mr. Easterbrook's priorities for NASA are only some among many valid possible goals for the agency, he makes incorrect and uninformed statements, unfair characterizations, and I believe misses the significance of manned space exploration. Click here and scroll down and read my comments.

Revisting the Brundtland Report

The overarching thesis of the 1987 United Nations report, Our Common Future: The World Commission on Environment and Development, could be thus summarized:

“The human misery due to the poverty of the developing world, paired with the excessive consumption of natural resources by the developed world, begets a menagerie of social, economic, and environmental ills, and these in turn beget more human misery.”

The Brundtland report thereby goes far beyond mere critique of resource management in its systematic (and oft-repeated) raising of issues of poverty: lack of proper sanitation, housing, education, nutrition, clean water, and healthcare (“decent human life”). Whereas in the northern hemisphere sustainability is commonly and popularly thought of as the preservation of natural resources, the report puts the problems of third world poverty front and center.

This juxtaposition of overuse of resources on the one hand and dearth on the other is raised again and again: in areas of agriculture, economics, housing, industry, and pollution, to name but a few. Implicit in the contrast is the quite sensible assumption that wealth is the result of abundance. But there are notable instances where that assumption might be undermined, or at least subverted.

It has been argued elsewhere that we have or nearly have reached the state of peak oil: where worldwide oil production, which heretofore has increased, plateaus and begins its inexorable decline. While a scarcity of oil may pose economic problems for both industrial and developing worlds, the decline of this resource is forcing technological and political advances in the energy sector. As a result, the world can look forward to an eventual decline in sulfur and carbon emissions from oil, both directly from reduced consumption, and indirectly due to improved efficiencies. And it is precisely the sort of efficiency improvements occasioned by recent oil market price increases which the World Commission on Environment and Development encourages. In this case, then, the impending dearth of an essential resource will eventually lead to environmental and even economic improvements.

In the case of coal, on the other hand, abundance of this resource is quite problematic. If we are near or at peak oil, we are perhaps two centuries from exhausting coal. Furthermore, coal is far more polluting than oil, with much more elevated levels of sulfur and carbon emissions. One might even imagine synthetic fuels derived from coal becoming economically feasible, not unlike that developed by Standard Oil and I. G. Farber and used by Nazi Germany. It is conceivable that given an abundance of coal, we have a future of greater carbon and sulfur emissions to look forward to.

The question then arises: how are advantageous environmental policies to be implemented when the beneficiaries of resource exploitation are not (at least in the short term) disadvantaged by such undesirable exploitation. If environmental consequences are not immediate, what structures can be implemented to make them so? “The enforcement of common interest often suffers because areas of political jurisdictions and areas of impact do not coincide.” (p. 47). Interestingly, the Lovins article I cited in a previous post picked up on this conundrum ten years after Our Common Future and in detail described the energy problems posed by economic systems in which a building’s developer is generally not its occupant. It appears that another decade on the same problems persist.

The conclusion is inevitable, if unpalatable in the immediate: “… it makes long-term economic sense to pursue environmentally sound policies.” (p. 334). It is precisely the abundance of a useful but noxious resource like coal, which makes the kind of market-driven environmental restrictions of interest. The Kyoto Protocol’s Carbon Credits provide a mechanism whereby the deleterious effects of pollution may be traded like a (negative) commodity, theoretically eventually leading to a reduction of atmospheric greenhouse gases. Hence an abundant but environmentally undesirable resource can be curtailed by being linked to an artificial negative commodity.

This subversion of abundance can lead to true wealth derived through sustainable development. But in order to do so, structural changes must be put in place to penalize consumption and reward conservation of particular resources. The use of market forces to do so is one way in which the call for action by the Brundtland report has been heeded. The alternative may be that “long-term” effects of short-sighted decisions may be just around the corner.